I’m beginning to look into the concept of legal cynicism. I’m somewhat amazed that I haven’t encountered this idea before now. (You can see a recent popular application of it here.) My dissertation argues, in part, that get-tough police practices in the 1950s provoked a rise in individual and collective resistance to arrest and stop-and-frisk in poor urban black neighborhoods.

There is no nationwide Ferguson Effect, experts say, only a local one, restricted to some large and medium cities and a few neighborhoods in those cities. On certain blocks, people are dying at a greater rate than they were in 2014 — and not just anyone, but disproportionately young black men.